The planning sheet

The sheet is the project. Chats come and go; the sheet is what both of you, and Claude, look at to know where things stand. Keep it boring and complete.

The tabs

The workbook opens on a start-here page, then has eleven tabs. You'll live in four of them (Vendors, Outreach, Budget, Tasks) and visit the rest when you need them.

• Overview. Totals that fill in on their own: budget, contracted, paid, guests who said yes, vendors booked, follow-ups due, tasks overdue. Nobody types here.
• Details. The brief, as rows: date range, region, guest count target and hard max, total budget, who's contributing, priorities, deal-breakers, accessibility needs, family constraints, and how many working days you wait before following up.
• Budget. One row per category: estimated, quoted, contracted, paid to date, balance due, next payment date, who's paying.
• Guests. One row per person, grouped by household: side, RSVP, meal, dietary needs, access needs, table, thank-you sent.
• Vendors. The pipeline. Every vendor has an ID, a stage, an owner and a next action with a date.
• Outreach. Every email or call, in or out. When a reply is needed, the follow-up date fills itself in.
• Quotes. Like-for-like comparison, with the total including fees, tax and any tips not already included.
• Tasks. What, who, when and status.
• Decisions. What you decided, what else you looked at, and why.
• Contracts. The clauses to find in every contract, and the questions they raise.
• Check-ins. One row per weekly check-in.

The vendor pipeline

Vendors is where the work moves, so its columns matter most:

The two rules that keep it honest: every open vendor has a next action with a date, and every vendor has one owner. "Both" is allowed, but it's usually where things stall.

How Claude reads and updates it

There are three ways, and you can mix them.

1. Read it through Google Drive (any plan)

Connect Google Drive and ask Claude to read the sheet by name. It reads the text of the sheet, which is all it needs. This is the default for status questions and the weekly check-in.

Read our "Wedding planning" sheet. Which vendors have a next action that's overdue or due in the next three days? Give me a table: vendor, owner, next action, due date. Then tell me which one you'd do first and why.

2. Edit it live, with you watching

The Google Sheets connector can edit a sheet in a pane beside the chat. It works on Claude on the web in Chrome, and in the desktop app with its built-in browser turned on. Elsewhere you get an "Open in Google" button instead.

This is the fastest way to log a pile of replies. It's also the easiest way to get a wrong number into your source of truth without noticing. So ask for the edits as a list first, check them, then let Claude make them:

Here are three vendor replies (pasted below). For each one, list the edits you'd make to the Vendors and Outreach tabs: tab, row, column, old value, new value. Don't change anything yet.

Then, once you've read the list:

Those look right except the second one: the deposit is refundable until March, so put "Partly". Make the edits.

3. Work on a copy (any plan)

If you'd rather keep Claude away from the live sheet, download it as .xlsx and add it to a chat. Claude can read it and hand back an edited .xlsx, since creating and editing spreadsheets is on every plan. Excel uploads need code execution and file creation turned on in your settings. You then copy the changes you want into the real sheet. Slower, but nothing changes unless you put it there.

There's also Claude for Google Workspace, a sidebar inside Google Sheets itself. It's in beta on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, and installs from the Google Workspace Marketplace. It's good for building formulas and tidying data, if you'd rather work in the sheet than in a chat.

House rules for the sheet

• Dates as YYYY-MM-DD. Claude reads them without guessing which is the month.
• Plain numbers for money. No currency signs, no "about 4k".
• One fact, one place. The deposit amount lives on Quotes and Budget, not in a note on Vendors.
• Write down why. The Decisions tab saves more arguments than any other. "We chose buffet because it fits the budget and the feel" ends the conversation when it comes up again in month five.
• Delete the example rows. They're grey, start with "Example:" and are made up, numbers included.
• Keep secrets out. No card numbers, bank details, passwords or ID numbers in the sheet. Claude doesn't need them, and a shared file is the wrong place for them anyway.